the_optimist

the_stacker_muse

I sat carefree in a café. Far away from my beloved city of Athens. I was enjoying a cup of coffee, but the little table wobbled badly.

I noticed that someone had placed a small stone beneath the short leg, yet the stone itself — proudly sculpted by pure rushing river waters — refused to support the table. With contemptuous display, it kept slipping away and the table kept swaying, almost spilling my coffee.

I called the waiter for help, and he willingly fixed the problem.

The little stone remained off to the side, delighting in its beauty, polished by clear and impetuous waters. I admired that tiny stone, which fit easily within my palm, and I rejoiced that it would not stoop to serve in a role so unworthy and alien to its nature.

I even took it as an invitation to myself: the wandering little craftsman.

Reverently, I took it into my hands, and after studying its face and every delicate detail, I drew lines upon it to reveal what it whispered to me:


![](https://m.stacker.news/141973)


*A gentle sleep and a sweet longing for home.*

The little stone of exile

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Scoresby

That's a great idea. I think I'll give it a try. I might have an idea...

I was thinking the other day about being passionate in your life. I was thinking that you do not become passionate simply because you saw someone and they captivated you. You do not become passionate because you felt an irresistible desire to have sex with them. You do not become passionate because you ache at the thought of them. You do not become passionate because you think about them constantly and cannot focus on anything else. You are not passionate when you write little verses about your pain.

You are passionate before you even meet the person you will fall in love with. Passion is reflected in the way you live your everyday life, both professionally and personally. Passionate in your decisions. In your goals. In your pain. In the way you face your failures. You are passionate in the ways you push beyond your limits. In your openness and vulnerability. In drawing joy from the things you fought for, from the things you refused to surrender, from the things you refused to compromise.

You are passionate in the way you live...

As I grew older, I came to understand the color Sundays have — all of my Sundays.

I realized that all my Sundays carry the fragrance of longing, scented with nostalgia.

When I was a child, I delighted in the gatherings of grown-ups, and my mind would wander wistfully into fairytale worlds where anyone could easily become anything.

Then I grew up.
The fairytales grew narrower, and the gatherings of adults became fewer. And the more they faded, the more longing took hold of me and kept me in its grip.

I longed for distant cities, for gentle people and steady winds, tenderly brushing past ruins, soothing wounds, bringing dreams.

I began to travel. The Sundays of exile taught me what true longing is, what the pain of homesickness truly means.

In the stillness of Sunday, my mind would drift and roam everywhere. Yet above all, it searched for a return: a home, a hearth, an open embrace waiting in expectation.

I returned many times. I left again even more times. The longing was never tamed.

And when I was asked to create an ornament above the doorway of an Athenian house, I could find nothing else to inscribe but an ancient ship, tormented as it journeys through the waves, stubbornly persisting in its search for the path of its lifelong return.

Sundays of longing

Say that you became great. Say that you were honored privately and publicly. Say that both the “faithful and the faithless” bowed before you, that they praised you, that they adored you, many of them, almost everyone.

And then, when your time came, you left for the journey with no return. And you depart with the illusion that you will remain in history, that you are history, and that you will never be forgotten.

Know this: no one will remember you. At best, they will remember what you did, what you said, what you wrote, what you painted or designed. Your photographs from moments of triumph and happiness will remain; some traces of you will remain, signs pointing toward you, but no one will truly remember you.

No one will remember the pain it took to create what you created, the humiliations you endured, the courage and bravery required to remain standing and dignified so that you might have something real, something authentic, to say to the world.

No one will remember your melancholy on cloudy days, your sorrows in times of loneliness, your joy in the days of friendship.

No one will remember the color of your eyes as you gazed at the sky during the dawn of the miracle of countless stars; no one will remember the delight of your senses when the first rains arrived.

No one will remember the way you touched, the way you smiled, the way you stood or sat, the way you expressed freedom, the way you asked for justice, the way you caressed, the way you pronounced the word joy and the phrase “I love you.”

You should know, you must know, that we are not merely what we create, what we say, what we design, write, or build. We are more than that, beyond the works of our hands. Much more.

We are souls traveling, dreams searching for fulfillment, hearts wandering through the darkness of the world looking for an embrace in which to rest.

We are far more than the small, wondrous, or great things we have made.

We are, all of us without exception, an insatiable love for life and communion, an endless thirst for love.

And because each of us is unique, no one will truly remember you. They will remember fragments of your journey, traces of your creation, but not you yourself.

So be careful. It is not worth wasting your soul — that unique treasure of yours — merely to become known and admired in the world of mortals with its narrow and selective memory.

Be careful. Do not lose your soul for the wrong reasons.

No one will remember you. And it would be tragic if, when the time comes, not even God Himself remembers you.

![](https://m.stacker.news/141256)

*Acrylic inks on stones from Mount Hymettus.*

No one will remember your eyes

🟩

It will be difficult to read your mind 😅, but I think it's important because it tells you how big a company is and how risky it might be.

THE SWEATER

Back around 2010, we went on an educational trip with our Faculty. We visited many monuments, mostly Christian and Byzantine, and enjoyed each other’s company and conversations.

One day, and it was springtime, the weather suddenly turned cold. The wind started blowing hard. We got chilly and tried to hide wherever we could find shelter. I walked into a small shop. Bought a sweater. It had a beautiful color, like ripe sour cherry, with a faint shimmer of tender, almost imperceptible decay.

I wore it and warmed myself. I wore it for several years. I loved its color and the memories it brought back each time I wrapped myself inside it.

Years passed. It became worn out, fell out of fashion, and ended up forgotten on some shelf in the wardrobe.

I found it again later and decided to wear it at work, where I constantly need spare clothes and quick changes.

![](https://m.stacker.news/140989)

So it found a role in life once more. It found a way to remain useful and to continue serving life, in its own quiet manner.

If the sweater had a mouth, I think it would have expressed gratitude. Because clothes are not like people, who so often insist on having the leading role, dominant and decisive. Clothes are content even with secondary roles, even with the very last role, as long as they are there, inside the sacred mystery of life, contributing to the beauty of the journey toward the light.

Clothes are simple, perhaps a little like saints, who passionately and lovingly seek the lowest places in life so that they may bear, like Atlas, everyone and everything with love. Or perhaps like small children, who care nothing for positions and oppositions, for victories and defeats, but only for the marvelous endlessness of the shared game.

The sweater

I no longer have expectations from people. I no longer wait for anything extraordinary from them.
Nothing special.

Just a compassionate glance in a moment of need, a handshake — even a formal one — during the holidays, a little kindness when there is reason for it, the granting of a little space so that I too may breathe, as every human being needs.

Yet often, very often, not even these things happen, and that hurts me. I suffer not because my expectations were not fulfilled, nor because certain people fell short of the great image I once had of them. For a long time now, I have tried not to form fixed ideas about anyone, because I believe it is a kind of slavery to confine people within limits and categories, even the noblest ones.

Every time I fail to truly meet with people, I hurt.

Of course, acting “wisely,” I could do what so many people, perhaps most, prefer to do. I could label others as toxic, ignore them, become highly selective, learn to choose only companions, circles, and friends who suit me well.

But I refuse to do that. I find it deeply degrading, both for myself and for life as I understand it. Instead, I insist on living through my failures with people, and on hurting. Because in this way I remain open to everyone, rather than selective and closed within whatever feels comfortable to me.

In this almost utopian way, I continue to live with the voluntary illusion that one day I may truly meet people, even if only in these small and ordinary things. A compassionate glance in a time of need. A holiday handshake. A little kindness and a little space to stand and rise together above the frozen ground of indifference.

So here I remain, a grown man now, still hurting from my failures with people, because this pain keeps my heart open without forcing it to be so. It keeps the sensitivity of my soul in bloom, the thirst of both spirit and body for human connection alive and insatiable.

Better a pain that never passes than a selective life, armored in comfort, indifference, and the safe company of only a chosen few.

![](https://m.stacker.news/140886)

> “The houses I had were taken from me” — George Seferis
> Egg tempera on wood, 25 × 35 cm.

Pain that never passes

The days of my week pass as they do for all ordinary people: with turbulent anxiety and heavy toil, like tightrope, walking above the chasms of feelings and emotions.

But on Sundays, my life is different.

On Sundays, I travel upon untamed dreams, mend my hopes, and struggle to set my heart upon new, unstained ground.

Above all, my Sundays are devoted to memory. For hours, I recall faces I loved, faces I came to know, and others I never met in person, yet found through the works of their hands, through the offerings of their souls to the world of mortals. Through these faces, I measure the breadth of my life, the openness of my heart, the worth (if indeed there is an) of my deeds, my whole existence. These faces, purified by distance and by my own growing, deliberate renunciation over the years of judging anything, become a white cocoon, a shroud of purification.

My Sundays are a memorial to true joy, which I possess only a little, so little that I do not entirely lose myself in sorrow, despair, and come to believe that these are the limits and the end of ordinary life.

On the Sundays of my remembrances, I expand and become a welcoming ocean, a vast, tranquil, alluring sea that embraces everything and tenderly promises, whispering softly in the ear, that in the end life will triumph; that everything, at last, will become light and a sacred, speaking silence that reveals all things...

Sundays

Most people, probably the majority of human beings, do not love their bodies. Instead, they judge them, feel ashamed of them, struggle against them, and try to force them closer to the ideal image they carry in their minds, the image dictated by the standards and fashions of every era.

And so, most people torment their bodies. They do not allow them to rejoice and live freely within the natural pleasures meant for them by their very nature.

Most people violate their bodies, and they do the same to their souls, their hearts, and to their whole marvelous and unique existence.

They do not try to discover their natural gifts, the talents granted to them by nature or by the good Lord. They do not seek to stand upon their virtues and build a life that moves toward the light, a life filled with freedom, growth, and above all, the joy that comes from living according to one’s nature.

And so many people force themselves to become something they were never destined to be from birth, something that does not truly belong to their being, while avoiding their other natural inclinations. 

And thus, most people today live unhappily: like fugitives, oppressed, like souls trapped inside a foreign body, squeezed into the lives of others, imitating the actions, passions, loves, and joys of other people.

Most people today do not love either their bodies or their souls, and within the illusion of this artificial self they do not even allow others to live their own lives with dignity. Instead, they judge them, both their souls and their bodies, and seek to mold them according to their own standards.

And so the world resembles a prison of unhappy beings, when one looks at it from above, from that place where false values, vain glories, and empty titles appear like dry straw in a stormy wind, like brushwood before a terrifying all-consuming fire.